Introduction

Haiku is something like Windows or Linux: an Operating System (OS). Some geeks like to play with alternative operating systems; it you are one of such geeks, you might want to give Haiku a try. Haiku is very fast and easy to use, but currently there are not many applications you can use with Haiku.

Haiku is a new open-source operating system that specifically targets personal computing. Inspired by the BeOS, Haiku is fast, simple to use, easy to learn and yet very powerful.

In this post, I will describe how to install Haiku on a spare harddisk partition directly without using a CD-ROM or USB memory key. I furthermore assume that you already installed Linux on another partition.

I would like to express my gratitude to luroh, a Haiku developer, for providing help on this topic.

Steps to be taken (summary)

1. Download a Haiku Anyboot image.
2. Convert Anyboot to a raw image.
3. Write the raw image to a disk partition.
4. Make the partition bootable.
5. Add the partition to your boot loader.
6. Set the partition type.

Download Haiku

You need to download an Anyboot image from the Haiku website.

Convert Anyboot to a raw image

Anyboot images are a combination of ISO and raw images. They can be written to CD-ROMs, USB memory keys and harddisks. If you need to write the image to a partition, then you must first convert the Anyboot image to a raw image. You can do so using:

dd if=haiku-anyboot.image of=haiku.raw bs=1M skip=$(expr $(od -j 454 -N4 -i -A n haiku-anyboot.image) / 2048)
dd if=/dev/zero of=haiku.raw bs=1 seek=506 count=4 conv=notrunc

Please modify the blue filenames as needed.

Write the raw image to a disk partition

For example, to write the raw disk image to the second partition of “sda2″:

dd if=haiku.raw of=/dev/sda2 bs=1M conv=notrunc

Again, modify as needed.

Make the partition bootable

After the image is written to the partition, it needs to be modified to make it bootable. You need the makebootable program from Haiku. You can also use makebootabletiny with Linux. (If the link to makebootabletiny would no longer work, here is a local copy: makebootabletiny.c download.)

Assuming that you downloaded makebootabletiny, you need to compile and run it:

gcc makebootabletiny.c -o makebootabletiny
./makebootabletiny /dev/sda2

Add the partition to your boot loader

This really depends on which boat loader you are using. For grub (legacy), you need to add these lines to /boot/grub/menu.lst:

title Haiku
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
chainloader +1

Check the documentation of your specific bootloader. Also you can check the Haiku Installation Guide.

Set the partition type

Optionally, you should set the partition type to “BeFS” using fdisk.

If you want to stay updated on alternative operating systems, keep an eye on www.osnews.com.

—

This howto is now included in the Haiku installation Guides.

Now that you just got yourself one of the best smartphones around the Samsung Galaxy SIII it is time to start installing apps on it. Galaxy S III already comes pre-installed with apps like. Google Search, Maps, Navigator, Gmail, YouTube, Calendar, Google Talk, Picasa integration, Swype, Dropbox etc. Here I have jotted down some more essential free apps for Galaxy SIII to get the most out of your phone. Though this list is focused on S3 most of these apps are good for any android device.

Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone who works with databases on a linux terminal faces this issue at some point in time — executing select * on a table with too many columns. And in linux since there is no horizontal scrolling, the output is wrapped and hence completely unusable.

You can use

--pager

property to get rid of that text wrap.
Read the rest of this entry »

Introduction

In our student’s  dorm, we want to share files. We also have one shared internet connection using ADSL. The download speed is OK, but the uplink is weak. Many students like to use torrents, which quickly drain the uplink and the connection table of the modemrouter. So I set up a server with a torrent client, which was accessible by a web interface. I replaced this server by a Iomega StorCenter Ix2-200 Cloud Edition Network Attached Storage (NAS) device, which I will refer to as ix-2.

The default torrent client on the ix-2 is bad beyond imagination, so I wanted to install transmission-daemon. Read the rest of this entry »

While Suze is typing this Latex code, Angel sees that Suze forgets a backslash (\\), so she adds that backslash. Suze works straigh on, but she sees the backslash added by Angel instantaneously. It is marked with the user color of Angel, so it draws her attention. She knows that she probably made an error, so now she chats with Angel, asking why she has to add a backslash when typing C#.

Suze and Angel are working on a highly confidential technical paper. Trusting the drafts to “the cloud” or a third party system was out of the question. They installed this software for collaborative editing on their own Linux server, although they also could have installed it on their own Windows XP client computers. But the server setup allows them to automatically produce a PDF version of their report each five minutes.

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Dell is notoriously infamous for selling adapters that tend to go bad after few years of heavy usage. In the last 3 years of my laptop use, I’ve already had to change my adapter thrice due to an unrecognized adapter bios warning. You can read about why this issue occurs here .

I don’t really mind this message but dell has gone further to annoy their consumers by forcing a cpu throttle to the lowest scaling frequencies. Also, they will not allow you to charge your battery if this message pops up, for no reason but to force you into buying a new adapter. Since this is expensive business and all three of my dead and dying adapters work perfectly fine as far as the voltages required for operation are concerned, I was desperately searching for a software bypass to somehow allow frequency scaling on my CPU and work on reasonable speeds. However googling didn’t help much at which point I started reading up on BIOS and ACPI, the ones responsible for power management. Finally, I stumbled upon this beautiful solution to bypass this limit dell forces upon me.

On probing ACPI on the linux kernel I came across /proc/acpi/processor/CPUx/bios_limit which is the limit the bios is asking the kernel to respect. Hence, all one needs to bypass it is to ask the kernel to ignore bios_limit using a kernel parameter via grub namely processor.ignore_ppc=1. So just add this line to grub.conf [ or to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX in /etc/grub.d/grub if you're using grub2] and you’re set.

Alternately, you can use rmclock[gui] on windows to achieve the same. However don’t forget to set the processor type to mobile if you’re using a laptop to get the right voltage values for various p-states. I hope this helps folks who’ve been annoyed by the way dell handles its adapters like me.

This week, I installed Linux Mint for my girlfriend after her Windows installation crashed. The idea was to temporarily use Linux until the new (and bigger) harddrive that we ordered would arrive. Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, but has some additions like codecs installed by default.

Installation went smooth. After the installation, she could easily access the NTFS data partition (modern Linux distributions use NTFS-3G for read/write access) and the computer booted up much faster than with Windows XP.

But she encountered a few problems:

• Openoffice Calc sometimes showed a very high CPU usage when selecting multiple cells, rendering Calc very slow and unusable. After some Googling, I found that it is in the Ubuntu bug database, bug number 568892. But the reactions of the developers do not show much interest. I replaced it with the less-featured Gnumeric.
• Many websites, including Gmail, suffer from bad font handling and anti-aliasing. In fact, most websites are a pain to the eyes. I tried Firefox, Epiphany, Arora, Konqueror, Chromium, and another browser which name I forgot, and numerous font settings (including Microsoft fonts), but nothing helped. [ Addition: The Ubuntu team works on a better font. ]
• When switching from Gnome to KDE, the KDE menu did not show a “shutdown” option because the Gnome and KDE login managers, also called display managers (gdm and kdm) are not compatible with each other. Only one of the desktop environments can show a shutdown option. When you want to shutdown your computer in KDE, use the kdm. Same for Gnome and gdm. Funny thing is that five years ago, someone posted a solution for this, but still the problem is in the normal software repositories.

I use Linux on some servers for years. It’s great software if you want to have control, stability, speed, easy remote access, easy software installation and so on for your server. But Linux on the desktop has always been somewhat of another story, and although much improvement has been made, I believe that Windows (XP of 7, never Vista) with Office 2003 or Office 2010 (skip 2007, it’s kinda beta of 2010) is still unbeatable for desktop computing. Some Apple users wouldn’t agree, though.

Hi,

If you are frustrated by Linux and your college’s network, which is windows based or sysadmins can help you with windows only, and sysadmins for a request call, replies as “use Windows”. If you are in a university then I am sure they use that damned( or good) software called as proxy (squid proxy to be specific). And you are a linux newbie then, here are some quick tips for you.

TIP # 1

You want your download manager (wget), updates by apt or aptitude to use a http proxy, you can use the following commands to export proxy to your environment

export http_proxy=http://user:password@proxy:port/

or

export http_proxy=http://proxy:port/

Things to note here are

• Type the command as it is, don’t leave unnecessary spaces.
• Username/password is the username and password you use to access the proxy, that is the same password which you type when you access internet using a web-browser. If you don’t use one, then use the second version of the command
• Proxy and port are the values that are the same as used in your web-browser, or you can ask check them out with your sysadmin, or anyone who has a working internet on the same network.

After you do this you can use apt or aptitude and it will use the http proxy you specified!

TIP # 2
For GNOME users : GNOME allows users to specify a proxy from a GUI, which you can find in

Preferences –> Network Proxy

It also allows you to specify username/password, by clicking on “Details”

TIP # 3
Using socks proxy with evolution (the e-mail client)You need a package named tsocks

sudo apt-get install tsocks

for Ubuntu users

or you can download it from here, http://tsocks.sourceforge.net

then just type

tsocks evolution

you might want to read the man page for configurations too.

So, that’s it. I hope it makes your life a little easier with Linux on network. Tell us about your experiences of using Linux behind proxies. Remember google search is your best resource!